U.S. should fight U.N. Web oversight, lawmakers say

By Eric Engleman, Bloomberg News

Posted:
02/06/2013 08:32:29 AM PST

Updated:
02/06/2013 10:15:22 AM PST

WASHINGTON - The United States should intensify efforts to prevent governments from exerting control over the Internet after a United Nations conference increased countries' ability to regulate Web traffic, a regulator said.

"The Internet is quite simply under assault," Robert McDowell, a Republican member of the Federal Communications Commission, said Tuesday at a joint hearing by three House subcommittees.

Supporters of international control of the Internet are "patient and persistent incrementalists who will never relent until their ends are achieved," he said.

The U.S. and other nations refused to sign a revised telecommunications treaty at a UN conference in Dubai in December, saying new provisions could allow Internet regulation and censorship by governments. Technology companies including Google Inc., owner of the world's largest Internet search engine, also opposed the changes.

The final pact seeks to give governments the ability to block Internet spam and inspect the content of online messages to determine if they can be blocked to solve "network congestion" issues, David Gross, a member of the U.S. delegation to the conference, said in testimony. Gross is an attorney with the law firm of Wiley Rein in Washington and a former State Department official.

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House lawmakers are considering draft legislation making it U.S. policy to promote a "global Internet free from government control," and advance the current decentralized "multi- stakeholder" model of Web governance by technical groups such as the nonprofit Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers. The bill is similar to a non-binding resolution that passed both houses of Congress before the Dubai conference.

The UN's International Telecommunication Union convened the Dubai conference to update a 1988 treaty setting principles for the telecommunications sector. New provisions seek to create greater transparency for mobile roaming charges, improve the energy-efficiency of communications networks, and create a single "globally harmonized" number for accessing emergency services, according to the ITU.

"The idea that the UN ought to be controlling the Internet to me is like putting the Taliban in charge of women's rights," Rep. Ted Poe, R-Texas, said at the hearing.

Countries that want the UN to regulate the Internet are led by President Vladimir "Putin's Russia and our good buddies the Chinese," Poe said.

Britain, Canada and Australia were among 55 delegations that refused to sign the telecommunications treaty or indicated they would need to check with their governments, while 89 countries signed the pact, according to a House Energy and Commerce Committee memorandum.

The treaty doesn't go into effect until January 2015, providing an opportunity to persuade other nations not to adopt the regulations, the committee said in the memorandum.

The U.S. should redouble efforts to rebuff Internet regulation efforts at future gatherings of the ITU, which plans meetings in May in Geneva and next year in South Korea, McDowell said.

"We have a lot of work ahead of us, particularly among nations who do not share our vision for maintaining the free flow of information across the Internet," Rep. Anna Eshoo, D-Calif., said at the hearing. "We have to have a strategy for engaging developing countries."

Hamadoun Toure, the ITU's secretary-general, said at the Dubai conference he disagreed that the new treaty would increase government control of the Internet and said there were no provisions on Web regulation in the text.

"We are pleased that so many members of Congress today voiced their support for the multi-stakeholder model, which has fostered the amazing growth and vitality of the Internet," Brad White, a spokesman for the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers, said in an email.

Icann manages the Internet's domain-name system under a contract with the Commerce Department.